We'll Be Gone for a Month...

...because we're retooling and restructuring our on-line business.
Check us out on Cyber Monday, November 30th!

Halloween by a Master of the Graphic Arts!

Click on the art to enlarge

A magnificent cover by the late, great Dave Stevens to celebrate the season!

I'm going to go party hearty, so I'll see you tomorrow!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Britain’s Frederic Wertham!

Most readers of this blog are familiar with Dr. Fredric Wertham and his notorious book Seduction of the Innocent, which basically attributed 1950s juvenile delinquency to the reading of comic books, specifically horror comics!
But, did you know that Great Britain had a similar cultural phenomenon, known as The Gorbals Vampire, also blaming American horror comics?

Bleeding Cool, a site of such importance to all comics fanboys and fangirls (yes, that includes us) that it should be one of your PRIMARY bookmarks, has posted info on a new BBC documentary about this infamous (and little-known) period of British history!

Link, read, listen, and learn.
For those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it!

Reading Room CRAZY "Drag-ula"

No, it's not a tale of a transvestite Transylvanian, but a humerous look at the original "bat man"...

...in this...unusual...tale from Atlas' CRAZY #2 (1954)

As was usual with the lead tale in CRAZY, it's lovingly-rendered by the amazing Bill Everett!

Heck, Bill might even have written it, since he had a number of scripting credits already!

Reading Room CRAZY "Frank N. Stein"

For the remainder of the Halloween season, we're gonna tickle your funny bone...

...with a bunch of rarely (if ever) reprinted horror-themed humor strips from the 1950s!

If imitation is "the sincerest form of flattery", then Atlas Comics was easily the most sincere company in the business with no less than four MAD / PANIC imitations; Crazy, Riot, Snafu, and Wild between 1953 and 1956!

Besides humor specialists like Dan DeCarlo, the sheer volume of Atlas humor titles gave the opportunity for artists who usually did Westerns or horror or sci-fi to expand their range, like this tale illustrated (and possibly written) by veteran Bill Everett, who proved more than up to the task with this spoof from Crazy V1 N1 (1953).

Note: Marvel's reincarnated the title several times including a long-run b/w magazine in the 70s-80s.